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CQEaUCHT OIEBDSIE 



OUT OF THE GATHERING BASKET 



OUT OF THE 

GATHE RING 

BASKET 

A Series of Sketches on 
Gardens and Books 

by 
GRACE GOODMAN MAURAN 




Published by 

RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR 
Chicago 

M CM XXI 






Copyright 1921 

by 

Ralph Fletcher Seymour 



JULi9'2l 



g)GI.A622397 



To C. S. M. 

Who Made My Garden Possible. 



Contents. 


^^fi'^V V<> CiSI 




Page 


The Gathering Basket 


S 


The Garden in Books 


11 


Flowery Traits 


23 


Bach Among the Madonnas 


33 


Rosy Reflections 


37 


The Picked Flower 


43 


The Child in the Garden 


49 


A Ghostly Garden Party 


55 


The Plush Pansy 


63 


The Garden as a Social Centre 


m 


Cosmos, Cats, and Coyotes 


75 


A Shredded Day 


81 


Architectural Blossoms 


87 


Souls, Seeds and Forsythias 


93 



OUT OF THE GATHERING BASKET 



The Gathering Basket 




URING a memorable conversa- 
tion between Bazarov, the hero 
of Turgenev's Fathers and Chil- 
dren, and his fascinating friend, Madame 
Odinstov, the subject of happiness is 
introduced, and Madame Odinstov ques- 
tions : "Tell me why it is that even when 
we are enjoying music, for instance, or a 
fine evening, or a conversation with sym- 
pathetic people, it all seems an intimation 
of some measureless happiness existing 
apart somewhere rather than actual hap- 
piness such as, I mean, we are ourselves 
in possession of?" 

This is profoundly and sadly true, but 
perhaps the fault is our own, perhaps we 
do not know how to * 'burst joy's grape 
against our palates fine," or perhaps our 
palates are not fine enough. Yet if ever 
this realization of happiness was ours, if 
ever there came a moment when we 
might pause in our enjoyment and say: 



4 THE GATHERING BASKET 

**this is true happiness," we would wish 
to make of the thing that gave us such 
deHght a Hfe-long pursuit. But of course 
it would be one thing for you and another 
for me; happiness, as we know, being an 
individual as well as a relative matter; 
it is the old case of one man's meat being 
another man's poison, and even the 
music, the fine evening and the sympa- 
thetic conversation which touched so 
nearly Madame Odinstov's ideal of hap- 
piness might mean boredom to others. 

In the concluding essay in Pater's vol- 
ume on The Renaissance the author 
refers to what he considers the most 
beautiful passage in the writings of Rous- 
seau, the passage in which is described the 
awakening in the great Frenchman of the 
literary sense. "An undefinable taint of 
death had always clung about Rosseau," 
says Pater, "and now in early manhood 
he believed himself smitten by mortal 
disease. He asked himself how he might 
make as much as possible of the interval 
that remained; and he was not biased by 
anything in his previous life when he 



THE GATHERING BASKET 5 

decided that it must be by intellectual 
excitement — " And Pater goes on to say 
that we are all condemned, all under the 
sentence of death but with a sort of 
indefinite reprieve. "We have an inter- 
val, and then our place knows us no more. 
Some spend this interval in listlessness, 
some in high passions, the wisest at 
least among the children of this world in 
art and song." We should get as many 
pulsations as possible into our given time, 
says the essayist, and we may get them 
through great passions, or by means of 
the various forms of enthusiastic activity, 
disinterested or otherwise, which come 
to us. 

A form of "enthusiastic activity" which 
seems to me worthy to fill at least a part 
of the space of the indefinite reprieve, 
and which comes the nearest to affording 
the tangible happiness for which 
Turgenev's heroine sighed, is gardening. 
Though we might wish to extend that 
reprieve indefinitely, and desire, as Mon- 
taigne confessed he desired, to banish the 
king of terrors altogether, still if he must 



6 THE GATHERING BASKET 

come, let us say, with Montaigne, that 
he may come and find us planting our 
cabbages. For to work in mother earth, 
to help plants to grow, and to assist 
flowers in reaching the full perfection of 
their beauty are tasks which to the 
garden-lover bring as rich and deep a 
happiness as can fall to the lot of mortal 
man or woman. There is true adventure 
for the spirit in the planting of a seed, 
there is something akin to maternal 
tenderness in the feeling with which one 
watches the young plant grow, and there 
is a joy not unlike the creative pleasure 
of the artist in seeing the result of one's 
labor and painstaking. 

Of course gardeners are like geniuses, 
they are born, not made, and one might 
say to the would-be gardener: "If your 
love of the soil is not deep enough, and 
your desire to cultivate growing things is 
not great enough to make you suffer and 
endure for the sweet face of a flower, why 
there is no use in your following this pro- 
fession, you will not find your happiness 
in a garden." As Kipling has said: 



THE GATHERING BASKET 7 

** — gardens are not made 
By singing: — *0h, how beautiful,' and sit- 
ing in the shade 
While better men than we go out and 

start their w^orking lives 
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with 

broken dinner knives. 
There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's 

not a head so thick, 
There's not a hand so weak and white, 

nor yet a heart so sick, 
But it can find some needful job that's 

crying to be done 
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth 

every one." 

No, the garden does not glorify those 
persons who work in it from a sense of 
duty rather than love, or the Peter Bells 
of the world who fail to see the poetry in 
primroses. It is not unusual to hear some 
luke-warm cultivator of plants say: "I 
never have any luck with flowers, they 
simply will not grow for me." This may 
be quite true, though it is not a question 
of luck but one of genuine, and some- 



8 THE GATHERING BASKET 

times secret sympathy between plant and 
gardener. 

In his essay on Nature, Emerson says, 
* 'Flowers belong so strictly to youth that 
we adult men soon come to feel that their 
beautiful generations concern not us, and 
we are old bachelors with our ridiculous 
tenderness." Ridiculous tenderness, in- 
deed! Was Wordsworth's tenderness for 
the meanest flower that blows, and 
Tennyson's for the flower in the crannied 
wall, and Burns' for the daisy that fell 
under his plough, ridiculous .^^ And though 
Huxley's interest in the gentian was partly 
scientific was there not a sentimental 
quality in his feeling for this particular 
flower .f^ And Emerson refuted his own 
assertion, for it is said that during the 
last years of his life he loved to look upon 
the little blossom called self-heal which 
crept into the grass before his study win- 
dow, and whose very name suggests the 
idea that it was the floral expression of 
one of the theories of the great essayist. 

Yet it is my conviction as a gardener 
that in order to enjoy the occupation of 



THE GATHERING BASKET 9 

gardening to its fullest extent one must 
be a book-lover as well as flower-lover, 
for literature and flowers seem to be so 
intertwined as to appear almost to grow 
on the same stem. We like, while reading 
in our libraries, to glance from the printed 
page to the bowl of flowers on the table, 
and the pleasure is equally great if, while 
weeding in our garden, we may look up 
to see, lying on a nearby table, or chair, 
or reposing in the gathering basket by the 
side of the scissors, or clipped blossoms a 
beloved book -friend, communion with 
which is to be the crown and the reward 
of the morning's work. 

And so this being my conviction it is 
seldom that I enter the garden unaccom- 
panied by a book, and it affords genuine 
satisfaction to see before me The Mer- 
chant of Venice, or The Idiot, or The 
Princess Cassimassima, or Richard Fev- 
erel, or The Mayor of Casterbridge, and 
to know that they are respectfully wait- 
ing there among the flowers the moment 
when I can give them attention and 
interest. And just as I like to have in 



10 THE GATHERING BASKET 

the garden one particular bed devoted to 
the old-fashioned flowers, the sweet- 
williams, and lantanas, and bouncing bets 
and four o'clock's and butter-cups, so do 
I frequently choose as garden companions 
such well-tried flowers of fiction as Eve- 
lina, Cecilia, Emma, Shirley, Henry 
Esmond, and David Copperfield. Some- 
times I commune with these well-loved 
friends, but frequently it is enough 
merely to know that they are there, ready 
to cast their spell and to recall, if desired, 
the memorable days of our first meeting. 
And when I return to the house, with 
gathering basket filled to the brim with 
the flowers destined for indoor decoration, 
there seems to be within my brain a kind 
of mental receptacle into which have 
been gathered small nosegays of thought 
that promise to give color and beauty 
to life. The essays within this little 
volume are made up of such nosegays, and 
if they fail to attract other visions than 
my own, at least I have had the pleasure 
of gathering them. 




The Garden In Books 

OOKS, as I have said, should form 
part of the accessories of a gar- 
den, but not necessarily books on 
country life, for as it has been said that 
the country is for the benefit of those 
born in town, so it might be stated with 
equal truth that books on out-of-door 
life are most enjoyed by readers sitting 
in city library chairs. 

The English critic, Leslie Stephens, 
belongs to this class, and in his delightful 
essay on Country Books, he freely ad- 
mits that though a cockney in grain, he 
loves to lean upon the farmyard gate of 
literature, "to hear Mrs. Poyser give a 
bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled 
into a placid doze by the humming of 
Dorlecote Mill, to sit down in Dandie 
Dinmont's parlour and bestow crumbs 
from his groaning table upon three genera- 
tions of Peppers and Mustards." But 
when he lifts his eyes from these imagi- 



12 THE GATHERING BASKET 

nary scenes, Mr. Stephens confesses that 
he is not adverse to gazing across the 
street where he can "dimly descry his 
neighbor behind his looking glass, adjust- 
ing the parting of his back hair, and 
achieving triumphs with his white tie 
calculated to excite the envy of a Brum- 
mel. And then," says Stephens, "in order 
to annihilate this neighbor and his even- 
ing parties, it is pleasant to take down 
one of the magicians of the shelf, and to 
wander off through quiet country lanes 
into some sleepy hollow of the past." 
There are many who share this critic's 
views, who enjoy breathing the country 
air through books, but who in reality 
choose always to be where they may 
catch glimpses of their neighbors' back 
hair and ties. 

But if I wanted to enjoy this book- 
country in its purest essence, its keenest 
reality, it would be neither George Eliot 
or Scott that I would choose as a guide, 
but rather that greatest of all interpre- 
ters of rural scenes, Thomas Hardy. I 
would stand on Norcombe Hill with 



THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 13 

Gabriel Oak, and watch this shepherd 
tend his sheep and young ewes; I would 
wander over that **great inviolate plane," 
Egdon Heath, with its unsympathetic 
habitant, Eustacia Vye, and I would 
stand beside Giles Winterbourne while 
he planted the young firs. "He had a 
marvelous power of making trees grow,'' 
had Giles Winterbourne. "Although he 
would seem to shovel the earth in quite 
carelessly, there was a sort of sympathy 
between himself and the fir, oak or beech 
that he was operating on, so that the 
roots took hold of the soil in a few 
days." 

Our cockney critic believes that poets 
are not to be trusted as potent weavers 
of this magic, this power to make one 
enjoy country air while seated in a town 
library, for the poets are too much given 
to sermonizing. Shelley's Skylark, and 
Keat's Nightingale are equally deter- 
mined, he avows, that we shall indulge 
in meditations upon life and death, and 
the mysterious meaning of the universe, 
while Matthew Arnold's Gipsy Scholar, 



14 THE GATHERING BASKET 

instead of lulling the reader into delicious 
dreams and longings to become a gipsy, 
cause him to worry over this strange 
disease of modern life, and about **our 
brains o'ertaxed and palsied hearts." 

But there are two books concerning 
whose potency in this matter of magic- 
weaving Mr. Stephens has no doubts, and 
in which a happy combination of circum- 
stances has provided us with true country 
idylls fresh from the soil. One of these is 
Izaak Walton's Complete Angler, a 
volume which if read at all by anglers is 
read I fancy only by the literary ones, 
and the other is Gilbert White's Natural 
History of Selbourne, a classic of the 
garden of which the same might be said, 
that if read by gardeners is read only by 
the bookish ones. Of the quaint sim- 
plicity and charm of this latter volume, 
Stephens has much to say, as has also 
James Russel Lowell who thus delight- 
fully writes of it: "Open the volume 
where you will, it takes you out of doors. 
In our broiling July weather one can 
walk out with this genially garrulous 



THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 15 

Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment 
instead of fatigue. It is a book," he goes 
on to say, '*that has also the delightful- 
ness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems 
never to have had any harder work to do 
than to study the habits of his feathered 
townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of 
the peaches on his wall. The natural 
term of a hog's life had more interest for 
him than that of an empire, and he writes 
gravely of making the acquaintance in 
1770, of an old family tortoise with whom 
he evidently fell in love at first sight.'' 

"There are moods," continues Lowell, 
*'in which this kind of history is infinitely 
refreshing. These creatures whom we 
aflFect to look down upon as the drudges 
of instinct are members of a common- 
wealth whose constitutions rest on im- 
movable bases. Never any need of 
reconstruction there ! They never dream 
of settling it by vote that eight hours are 
equal to ten, or that one creature is as 
clever as another and no more. They do 
not use their poor wits in regulating 
God's clocks, nor think they cannot go 



16 THE GATHERING BASKET 

astray as long as they carry their guide- 
board about with them — " 

The essay of Lowell's from which these 
quotations are made is said by Stephens 
to be one of the most charming essays on 
gardens ever written, and one has but to 
dip into it to realize the truth of this 
statement, and yet both White and 
Lowell seem to have confined their garden 
acquaintance almost wholly to birds and 
insects and to have ignored those equally 
beautiful and responsive habitants of a 
garden, the flowers. Lowell's essay bears 
the title My Garden Acquaintance, but 
what kind of a garden could it have 
been that yielded friendship only with 
birds and none with growing plants. 
And in White's History, which frequently 
takes the form of letters, the flowers are 
but minor characters and not to be put 
on the same plane with the British 
hirundines, the sand-martins, and swifts. 
"Dear sir," he characteristically writes 
to the Honourable Daines Barrington, 
**Your observation that the cuckoo does 
not deposit its eggs indiscriminately in 



THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 17 

the nest of the first bird that comes in its 
way, but probably looks out a nurse in 
some degree congenerous with whom to 
intrust its young is perfectly new to me; 
and struck me so forcibly, that I naturally 
fell into a train of thought that led me to 
consider whether the fact was so, and 
what reason there was for it." 

There are indeed moods, as Lowell has 
said, in which this kind of history is 
infinitely refreshing, and the reader is 
quite in sympathy with the author's 
conviction, expressed in the opening lines 
of his "advertisement," that **if station- 
ary men w^ould pay some attention to the 
districts in which they reside, and would 
publish their thoughts respecting the 
objects that surround them, from such 
material might be drawn the most com- 
plete county-histories which are still 
wanting — " 

So in spite of what Leslie Stephens has 
said regarding the sermonizing habits of 
poets, when writing about nature, it is 
to the poets we must turn for a true 
interpretation of the soul of a flower. 



18 THE GATHERING BASKET 

To Emily Dickenson's description of the 
may-flower : 

"Pink, small, and punctual, 

Aromatic, low. 
Covert in April 

Candid in May, 

Dear to the moss, 

Known by the knoll 

Next to the robin 

In every human soul/' 

And to her interpretation of the char- 
acter of an anonymous blossom in the 
following lines: 

"So bashful when I spied her, 

So pretty, so ashamed ! 
So hidden in her leaflets. 

Lest anybody find; 

So breathless till I passed her. 

So helpless when I turned 
And bore her, struggling, blushing 

Her simple haunts beyond ! 



THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 19 

For whom I robbed the dingle, 
For whom betrayed the dell, 

Many will doubtless ask me, 
But I shall never tell r' 

And every gardener loves Miss Dicken- 
son's tribute to that constant friend of all 
out-of-door workers, the grass. 

''The grass so little has to do, 

A sphere of simple green. 
With only butterflies to brood. 

And bees to entertain. 

And stir all day to pretty tunes 

The breezes fetch along 
And hold the sunshine in its lap 

And bow to everything; 

And thread the dew all night, like pearls. 

And make itself so fine — 
A duchess were too common for such a 

noticing 

And even when it dies, to pass 

In odors so divine 
As lowly spices gone to sleep, 

Or amulets of pine. 



20 THE GATHERING BASKET 

And then to dwell in sovereign barns, 

And dream the days away, 
The grass so little has to do, 

I wish I were the hay!" 

It is this way of treating the flower, 
and all growing things, as individuals, or 
as playing their parts in the lives of 
individuals that delights the gardener 
who rejoices to know that the influence 
of her floral friends is recognized and that 
they are permitted to take their rightful 
places in the human drama. 

What would poor mad Ophelia be 
without her rosemary that's for remem- 
brance, and her pansies which are for 
thought? And who could think of the 
lovely Perdita without her garden, her 
marigolds **that go to bed with the sun 
and her pale primroses that die un- 
married." And to speak of primroses is 
to recall another of Shakespeare's im- 
mortal women, Imogen, whose face was 
like that flower, whose veins recalled the 
azur'd harebell, and whose breath out- 
sweetened the eglantine leaf. 



THE GARDEN IN BOOKS 21 

One might write a literary history of 
the violet, hiding beside the mossy stone, 
springing from the pure and unpolluted 
flesh of the dead Ophelia, and comforting 
the dying Keats who declared that he 
could almost feel it growing over his 
grave. Burns atoned to the ''wee, modest 
crimson-tipped" daisy that fell a victim 
to his plough by writing an unforgettable 
poem about it, and though he sermonized, 
as Stephens says is the way with poets, 
and compared his own fate to that of the 
flower, we are grateful for the sermon. 
William Vaughn Moody immortalized a 
youthful love in his Heart's Wild-Flower : 

*'But where she strays, through blight or 
blooth, one fadeless flower she wears, 

A little gift God gave my youth, — whose 
petals dim were fears. 

Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesi- 
tancies, and tears.'' 

And who that has loved and wept over 
Tennyson's Maud can forget the way in 
which the flowers sympathized with the 



22 THE GATHERING BASKET 

lover as he waited in the garden for the 
coming of his adored one: 

**The red rose cried, *she is near, she is 

near.' 
And the white rose weeps, 'she is late;' 
The larkspur listens, *I hear, I hear;' 
And the lily whispers, 'I wait.' " 

It is in lines like these that flowers 
come into their own, and every gardener 
knows that they can thus sympathize 
with moods and feelings. But she knows 
too, that one must live with them long 
and love them truly before they will 
yield this lovely blossom of understand- 
ing. 




Flowery Traits 

N THE introduction to her illumi- 
nating book on Japanese Flower 
Arrangement, Mary Averill says 
that she believes that flowers are a greater 
factor in the life of the Japanese than in 
that of any other nation. She even goes 
so far as to state that, having followed 
this art of arranging flowers from their 
youth up, the Japanese have gained 
thereby ideas of proportion, powers of 
concentration, and some of their finest 
traits of character. 

High praise this for so seemingly simple 
a thing as a flower, but if it be true, if 
the love of flowers and the study of their 
formation and characteristics do leave 
their impress upon character, then the 
American people have too much neglec- 
ted a valuable aid to education and cul- 
ture. For although we recognize gardens 
and flowers as ornamental adjuncts to 
life we are inclined to look upon the 



24 THE GATHERING BASKET 

garden enthusiast as upon the ardent 
golfer, as one engaged in a harmless and 
healthful pastime. 

And there is no doubt but what living 
among and working with flowers does 
affect character; florets seem to have a 
certain gentleness and kindliness not 
betrayed by other tradesmen, and one 
can more readily imagine a butcher 
committing murder than a gardener. 

And then too, flowers have strong 
characters of their own, and just as with 
people, there are some to whom you 
surrender your heart at the first meeting, 
and others with whom you could never 
wish to be on terms of intimacy. Who, 
for instance, could be intimate with a 
canna or a begonia, and what flower-lover 
could ever grow sentimental over a salvia, 
or a cock's-comb.^ ^ 

And there are flowers possessed of 
certain contrary ways which beget in 
those who live with them a kind of 
horticultural irritation. For example, 
there are what might be called floppy 
flowers, such as the larkspur or gladiolus, 



FLOWERY TRAITS 25 

flowers which seem to possess no back- 
bone and require constant bolstering on 
the part of the gardener. There are 
people like that, people who seem to have 
no self-reliance, who demand frequent 
proppings, and who if left to themselves 
would be in a drooping condition most of 
the time. After one has given frequent 
assistance to such flowers, and finds them 
evading the prop, one is inclined to say 
to the leaning larkspur, or reclining 
gladiolus: *'Well, fall where you will, I 
am done with you," just as one says to 
their human counterparts: "If you can't 
take care of yourselves you ought to fall." 
And then there are flowers which fail to 
fulfill their promise, which go, as we say, 
all to leaf, and after raising hopes of 
gorgeous blossomings, put forth a few 
meagre blossoms and are done. We have 
all known people like this, people who 
make a great show of their leaves of 
promise, who dazzle us with prospects of 
great achievements, and in the end 
amount to no more than that despised 
habitant of a garden, a hill of beans. 



26 THE GATHERING BASKET 

And some jBowers go too early to seed, 
they fill the gardener's soul with beauty 
one morning, and a few days after have 
retired into a premature state of seediness. 
Of course the day-lily confesses its brevity 
by its name, but in the case of this flower 
when one blossom fades there is another 
to take its place so that you may be on 
with the new love as soon as you are off 
with the old. There are people who 
wither too early in their lives, who are 
always confiding to you that they have 
outlived this pleasure or that, and who 
unlike the day-lily fail to replace the old 
blossom of pleasure by a finer new one. 

It was said of Balzac that he accepted 
the theory that a man's name influences 
his character, and that even the initial 
of a name held within it great power for 
good or evil, a man afflicted with the 
tortuous letter Z being foredoomed to a 
life of torment. If this were true it 
might be well to name children after 
flowers, avoiding of course the ill-named 
zinnia, though experience has proven 
how very unlily like girls named Lily 



FLOWERY TRAITS 27 

often are, how human Roses frequently 
but little resemble in character the 
Queen of flowers, and how the Violets 
are sometimes known to be characterized 
by the most worldly ideals and self- 
seeking ways. The mother of one of 
Meredith's heroines who was possessed 
of the poetic passion for flowers gave her 
heart to dahlias, **and Dahlia was the 
name uttered at the christening of her 
eldest daughter." 

But this custom of naming children 
after flowers has one drawback: the 
name while suiting the child seems un- 
suited to the elderly woman. Violet, 
Daisy, and Dahlia are names eminently 
appropriate for the day of christening, 
but grandmother Violet, great aunt 
Daisy, and old-maid Dahlia sound to 
some ears absurd. Yet why should this 
be so? The violet goes to seed, but 
retains within that seed the qualities of 
unobtrusiveness and modesty for which 
it is admired; the daisy may preserve its 
freshness and innocence when externally 
it is dried and faded and the dahlia's 



28 THE GATHERING BASKET 

glorious color is not altogether at the 
mercy of time. As Professor Santayanna 
has more gracefully expressed it: "Even 
under the inevitable crust of age, the soul 
remains young, and wherever it is able 
to break through sprouts into something 
green and tender." And he might have 
added that these elderly human sprouts 
sometimes reveal a beauty unknown to 
those of the younger plant, the kind of 
beauty of which Pater speaks in describ- 
ing the charm or La Giconda: "A beauty 
wrought out from within, the deposit, 
little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and 
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions." 
As a gardener I am sometimes drawn 
into idle and fanciful meditations con- 
cerning the origin of certain names of 
flowers, and I should like to know some- 
thing of those daring individuals who 
presumed to bestow these names. It 
would delight me, for instance, to know 
what lover of good eating ventured to 
perpetuate his fondness for butter and 
eggs by calling a flower by such a mate- 
rialistic name, and what lonely bachelor 



FLOWERY TRAITS 29 

consoled himself for the absence of but- 
tons, and a sewer-on of buttons, by 
naming a flower a bachelor's button. 

Did certain English flowers so resemble 
the bells of Canterbury cathedral as to 
be deemed worthy of the name of canter- 
bury bell? Was there a time when foxes 
wore gloves and larks had spurs that two 
of our most popular flowers should be 
called foxgloves and larkspurs? Of course 
we understand how the bloodroot, the 
Solomon's seal, and the milkweed got 
their names, and it is obvious that the 
daisy is the day's eye. And then there 
are flowers like the hyacinth which have 
a mythical origin and which are asso- 
ciated with some romantic legend, but 
in the cases of most flowers there is no 
accounting for the name, and no way of 
tracing its history. 

Some one, I think it was Miss Wilkin- 
son, once wrote a charming poem about 
that quaint and old-fashioned habitant 
of both wild and cultivated places, the 
bouncing bet, and the writer intimated 
that this flower having been originally 



30 THE GATHERING BASKET 

wild, had one day bounced into a garden 
and taken to cultivated ways. It must 
have been a part of Betty's system of 
culture to forego bouncing habits for in 
the garden she is all too much inclined 
to lie prostrate instead of living up to her 
reputation for action, such no doubt 
being one of the evil consequences of 
cultivation. 

That delicate little garden flower called 
love-in-a-mist was evidently named by 
some man who had been disappointed in 
love, for it bears another name which is 
in itself a sad revelation of this lover's 
disillusionment. It is sometimes called 
devil-in-a-bush, and it is all too evident 
that this unhappy man after groping 
about in the tantalizing mists of love, 
discovered at last that love was not there 
at all, but only some horrid evil creature 
that was lying in wait for his soul. 

Poets seem to love the mere names of 
flowers and often by a simple enumera- 
tion of these names conjure up a picture 
and produce a spell. In the second verse 
of William Vaughan Moody's beautiful 



FLOWERY TRAITS 31 

poem, Gloucester Moors we have such 
an instance: 

"Jill — o'er the ground is purple blue, 

Blue is the quaker-maid. 
The wild geranium holds its dew 

Long in the boulder's shade. 

Wax-red hangs the cup 

From the huckleberry boughs 

In barberry bells the gray moths sup. 
Or where the choke-cherry lifts high up 

Sweet bowls for their carouse." 

One can hardly read this poem without 
experiencing a desire to depart at once 
for Gloucester Moors, in order to make 
the acquaintance, or to renew an ac- 
quaintance with two such charmingly 
named flowers as jill-o'er-the-ground, and 
the quaker-maid. 

These idle fancies, thrown hap-hazard 
into the mental gathering basket prove 
one thing at least, that whether we 
accept or not the belief of the Japanese, 
that the study of flowers influences 
character it is certain that living and 



32 THE GATHERING BASKET 

working among them does indeed color 
one's thoughts and create certain flowery 
fancies. 



Bach Among the Madonnas 




USIC came to me this 
in the garden, and it was high 
time that it did so, for had I 
not all my life gone to music. Had I not 
arrayed myself in my best garments, 
offered my money at a box-office, sat 
among those who knew so much more 
about music than I did, or so much less, 
and in fact done everything possible to 
desecrate this greatest of the arts in 
order to **enjoy" it. And now it was time 
that music came to me, if for nothing but 
to save myself, and itself, from the dese- 
cration. 

I think it was a Bach fugue that chose 
to thus honor me and my garden, though 
I don't know exactly what a fugue is, and 
I am not altogether sure that it was 
Bach. But the music harmonized so 
well with the madonna lilies whose 
roots I was cultivating that I like to 
think it was Bach. And it was pleasant 



34 THE GATHERING BASKET 

to have this music disembodied, unas- 
soeiated with a personality who asks a 
price for his art. To be sure I am dimly- 
aware that I owe these out-of-door 
harmonies to a noted violinist who has 
rented my neighbor's house for the 
summer, and I have been informed that 
it has been made financially worth his 
while to play in a nearby famous summer 
garden, but these material details are 
lost sight of among the lilacs and haw- 
thorns, and I choose to be only conscious 
of the glorious fact that a garden becomes 
a heaven when it is filled with the music 
of the great composer. And yet one can 
hardly associate Bach with rural life, and 
scenes, though it is said that he has 
written a sonata which concludes with a 
fugue suggested by the cackle of a 
barnyard hen. Who knows but what this 
was the fugue that came to me this 
morning, and that my neighbor, in- 
spired by the sight of a gardener in soiled 
cotton morning dress, and shabby tennis 
shoes, cultivating her madonna lilies that 
grow in close proximity to the chicken 



BACH AMONG THE MADONNAS 35 

yard, had been reminded of this fugue 
and had chosen it for his morning exer- 
cise. 

But what does it matter? I am not 
quite sure that music that expresses love 
of nature and gardens would sound better 
here than in a concert hall. Of course 
Mendelsohn's famous Spring Song is 
spring itself, the very soul of a garden 
and of the flowers that grow therein, and 
that part of Goldmark's Country Wed- 
ding which is named In the Garden, is 
flowers turned into notes, but who would 
care to listen to McDowell's lovely com- 
position entitled To a Wild Rose, while 
picking wild roses, or to his exquisite To 
a Water Lily when in the act of plucking 
one of those flowers .^^ And if that beloved 
operatic image of my youth, Martha 
should step from the stage into my garden 
and choose to sing, among my roses, her 
famous Last Rose of Summer I am sure 
that I should feel like driving her from 
the garden. 

Many music lovers confess that they 
are quite ignorant of the technique of 



36 THE GATHERING BASKET 

music, and that what they really do care 
for is its poetry, its flower-like quality, 
its power of stimulation, and what Pater 
calls its perfect identification of form and 
matter. And belonging to this class it 
makes no difference to me whether the 
morning recital among the madonnas was 
made up of Bach compositions or those of 
a less reverent spirit. But had Turgenev's 
Madame Odinstov been present at this 
morning entertainment in a garden she 
might have approached very near to the 
actual happiness for which she yearned. 
And I know too that this form of a 
musical has forever spoiled me for the 
kind that requires for its enjoyment, 
prosaic dressings up and sallyings forth to 
a conventional gathering place. 




Rosy Reflections 



gjHEN the gathering basket is filled 
with roses, cut from the rose 
garden, it seems as if history and 
literature met in a fragrant and fasci- 
nating jumble. There is General Jacque- 
minot and Meg Merrilies, Paul Neyron, 
and Dorothy Perkins, Caroline Testout 
and Charles Lamb, Madame Plantier 
and John Stuart Mill, Papa Lambert 
and The Prairie Queen. And as I gather 
this oddly assorted company into sepa- 
rate bouquet groups I find my spirit is 
humbled by my unfamiliarity with the 
historical personages whose names have 
been given to the roses, and rendered 
proud by my ability to attach a quota- 
tion to every flower. 

But who was General Jacqueminot, and 
what did he do to merit the high honor 
of having a rose named after him.^ And 
who was Paul Neyron, and Mrs. John 
Laing, and Caroline Testout, and Captain 



38 THE GATHERING BASKET 

Christy? I have always loved Madame 
Plantier as a rose that embodies the pure 
essence of June, but I haven't an idea who 
the lady was, or whether she was as 
lovely as the flower that immortalizes 
her name. 

On the other hand I cannot glance at 
these bouquets of freshly gathered roses 
without plunging at once into poetry. I 
usually begin by bidding the General: 

**Goe, happy rose, and enterwove 
With other flowers, bind my love. 
Tell her too she must not be 
Longer flowing, longer free. 
That so oft has fetter'd me." 

And then I remark to Papa Lambert 
that the roses of Herrick's time brought 
quite different thoughts to the mind of a 
poet from those suggested by the modern 
rose to a modern poet. To a Herrick the 
flower was but a messenger of love, but to 
a George Meredith it suggests in the 
way it unfolds itself in **ugly mold" the 
manner in which the soul unfolds "through 
blood and tears." 



ROSY REFLECTIONS 30 

And the rose has always been con- 
sidered as the most consolatory of flowers; 
according to Keats it was a cure for "the 
melancholy fit," and Sidney Lanier 
prayed : 

* 'Would that my songs might be 

What roses make by day and night — 

Distillments of my clod of misery 
Into delight." 

It was "roses, roses, with never a spray 
of yew," that Matthew Arnold would 
strew upon the dead heroine of his 
exquisite dirge, Requiescat, and Roses 
in the Subway, inspired Dana Burnet to 
write : 

"A wan-cheeked girl with faded eyes — 
Came stumbling down the crowded car 

Clutching her burden to her heart 
As though she held a star — 

Roses, I swear it, red and sweet 

And struggling from her pinched white 
hands 

Roses like captured hostages 
From far and fairy lands." 



40 THE GATHERING BASKET 

And there are heroines in prose who 
seem, in the memory of readers, to be 
always associated with this flower: "Oh, 
may I get this rose?" questioned Maggie 
TulHver of her would-be lover, Stephen 
Guest, as they stood together in the con- 
servatory, *'I think I am quite wicked 
with roses — I like to gather them and 
smell them till they have no scent left!" 
Poor Maggie! There were so few roses 
in her brief life. Hardy's Eustacia Vye 
had a face that recalled Bourbon roses, 
and yellow roses served as a medium of 
expression for the thwarted passion of the 
lovers in Mrs. Wharton's latest novel, 
The Age of Innocence. 

"He who would have beautiful roses in 
his garden must have beautiful roses in 
his heart," writes Dean Hole, in that 
classic of the rose-bed, A Book About 
Roses. And the author goes on to state. 
"He must love them well and always. 
To win he must woo, as Jacob wooed 
Laban's daughter, though drought and 
frost consume. He must have not only 
the glowing admiration, the enthusiasm. 



ROSY REFLECTIONS 41 

and the passion, but the tenderness, the 
thoughtfulness, the reverence, the watch- 
fulness of love. And as instance of love's 
watchfulness, in this matter, he cites the 
case of some professional rose-growers of 
whom it was said that they employed 
hundreds of young men with "gig-um- 
brellas to stand over the roses when the 
rain was too heavy/' Such an anecdote 
does not sound absurd to the garden 
enthusiast who would readily shield a 
favorite rose with her best umbrella if 
any good to the flower could be gained 
thereby. 

One might slightly change Dean Hole's 
lines and say that he who has beautiful 
roses growing in his garden is bound to 
have them growing in his heart, for there 
is something in the mere presence of this 
Queen of flowers that puts one in harmony 
with the universe. And it is not mere 
poetry, when Keats advises the victim of 
the blues to glut his sorrow on a morning 
rose, or when Lanier declares these flowers 
to be **distillments of misery into delight." 
It is truth won by experience. 



The Picked Flower 



F WE accept the Wordsworthian 
faith that every flower enjoys 
the air it breathes, and add to 
this the gardener's conviction that flow- 
ers are grateful for care, and conscious 
of cultivation, then as gardeners we owe 
a certain duty to the picked flower. Or 
rather does our obligation begin before 
the picking, and ere we shorten the days 
of a flower by removing it from its native 
spot we should ask ourselves whether we 
are justified in such an act, and whether 
the friends, or occasions for whom the 
sacrifice is to be made, are altogether 
worthy. 

Only yesterday I picked a bunch of my 
fairest mourning brides for a gardenless 
city friend, and consoled myself for thus 
shortening their existence, and depriving 
myself of some lovely companions by 
thinking of the joy they would bring to 
mv less fortunate friend. 



44 THE GATHERING BASKET 

**How lovely," she said, as she lifted 
them out of the wet box, where I had so 
carefully laid them, and then, alas! for 
my lovely brides, she proceeded to place 
them on a table at her side while she 
plunged at once into a conversation 
regarding her new and taxing duties as 
an officer in some society for the protec- 
tion of wild flowers. And coward that I 
was, I never had the courage to ask: 
**and will you not care for these cultivated 
blossoms, and see to it that they are 
comfortably placed?" And all through- 
out my visit I could feel the reproachful 
eyes of those withering brides upon me, 
and never once did I venture to intercede 
for their lives, but went away, hoping 
against hope, that after my departure 
they might enter the watery haven that 
they so well deserved. 

And I was not altogether sure that even 
were my mourning brides fortunate 
enough to reach at last the desired resting 
place that it would be a place altogether 
worthy of their charms. I said to myself, 
in malice no doubt, that any woman who 



THE PICKED FLOWER 45 

was capable of keeping flowers out of 
water was quite equal to permitting them 
to be choked to death in some tight- 
necked vase or bowl. 

There are women who have a perfect 
genius for arranging flowers, who can by 
pure instinct tell the proper receptacle 
for each blossom, and which of these 
receptacles will most enhance their beauty. 
It does not seem too much to say that 
you can tell a woman's character by the 
way in which she arranges her flowers, or 
that it would be well to beware of one 
who puts them to death in tight-necked 
vases. I am quite sure that Mary 
Averill, the author of Japanese Flower 
Arrangement, would bear me out in such 
statements, for she says that the Japanese 
schools where the art of flower arrange- 
ment is taught are based on the Buddhist 
desire to preserve life. '*From the desire 
to preserve animal life,'' says this author, 
"came the wish to preserve plant life, 
and it came to be one of the occupations 
of priests to arrange and care for those 
plants and flowers which were the most 



46 THE GATHERING BASKET 

popular offerings to the gods." For a long 
time the art had no particular meaning, 
but gradually there grew up a system and 
a school each of which had its promoters 
and followers. The idea of good and evil 
fortune governs both selection of mater- 
ial and form of arrangement. The color 
of some flowers are considered by the 
Japanese as unlucky. Red flowers which 
are used at funerals are undesirable, not 
only for that reason, but also because 
red is supposed to suggest the red flames 
of a fire of which these people stand in 
terror. An odd number of flowers is 
lucky while even numbers are unlucky. 
For a house-warming white flowers are 
used, and to celebrate an inheritance all 
kinds of evergreens or chrysanthemums, 
or any flower which suggests long life are 
used. All of Japan's most celebrated 
generals have been masters of this art 
of flower arrangement, declares this au- 
thor, for it was found that such study 
calmed their minds and made clear their 
decisions for the field of action. 



THE PICKED FLOWER 47 

It is pleasant for an American gardener 
to know herself to be backed in her 
theories and ideals by the Japanese 
generals, and although we will not yield 
to this nation in our love of flowers, we 
might learn from it a more scientific and 
artistic treatment of the picked blossom. 
To us a flower in a vase is merely a flower 
in a vase, to the Japanese it is a symbol of 
life and death. Yet we gardeners who 
work constantly among the flowers soon 
come to realize that their mere compan- 
ionship is a solace, that it calms the mind 
and makes clear our decisions for the 
field of action. 




The Child in the Garden 



IHIS morning I had a visitor, an 
uninvited guest who, strange as 
it may seem, was a welcome one. 
I don't know his name, I purposely re- 
frained from asking it, and it appeared 
as if he as purposely refrained from giv- 
ing it. But I learned these facts about 
him: that he was four years old last 
May, that he lived in a city apartment, 
and that this was his first visit to a 
garden. 

A little white booklet containing Pater's 
sketch of The Child in the House lay 
on the table in the summer house, and I 
recalled how this Pater child had 
wandered one evening through a garden 
gate which was usually closed, but on this 
occasion stood open, inviting his presence. 
"And lo! within, a great red hawthorn in 
full flower, embossing heavily the bleached 
and twisted trunk and branches, so aged 
that there were but few green leaves 



50 THE GATHERING BASKET 

thereon — a plumage of tender, crimson 

fire out of the heart of the dry wood 

Was it some periodic moment in the 
expansion of soul within him, or mere 
trick of heat in the heavily-laden summer 
air? But the beauty of the thing struck 
home to him feverishly ; and in dreams all 
night he loitered along a magic roadway 
of crimson flowers which seemed to open 
ruddily in thick fresh masses about his 
feet, and fill softly all the little hollows 

in the bank on either side. Also then 

for the first time, he seemed to experience 
a passionateness in his relation to fair 
outward objects, an inexplicable excite- 
ment in their presence, which disturbed 
him, and from which he half longed to 
be free." 

Had my morning visitor sprung up out 
of the earth he could not have seemed 
more a part of the garden, so thoroughly 
in harmony with the place was his bright 
presence, and so like unto the flowers was 
his gay little face. After I had finished 
with the asters I gave myself up to the 
novel pleasure of introducing my guest to 



THE CHILD IN THE GARDEN 51 

the flowers, and of noting the impression 
that these habitants of a garden made 
upon his horticulturally unsophisticated 
nature. At first he only stared at them 
and was silent, but this was partly 
because of his shyness of me, and when 
the human ice was melted the floral ice 
as quickly gave way, and my guest 
appeared as one brought up among 
primroses and pinks. 

He liked best those flowers whose 
names conveyed some meaning to his 
mind: the johnny -jump-ups, bouncing 
bets, sweet williams, and job's tears, 
and he laughed aloud at the stories I 
told about these blossoms. There was 
the fading remnant of a jack-in-the-pulpit 
in one of the beds and I assured my visitor 
that this was the preacher of the woods 
who was wont to preach only to the 
trilliums, violets, adder's tongues, and 
other habitants of wild places, but that 
in order to keep peace among my johnny- 
jump-ups, and bouncing bets I had intro- 
duced this minister from the wilds into 
my cultivated garden where he delivered 



52 THE GATHERING BASKET 

sermons not only to wayward blossoms, 
but to those ruthless pickers of wild 
flowers who seemed bent upon robbing 
the world of much of its beauty. 

Together we watched the bees disap- 
pear into the hallways of foxgloves, and 
waited at the entrances for them to come 
out. We made poppy -shows that were 
innocent of any poppies and pressed 
small wreaths of larkspurs in Pater's 
Child in the House. We sailed lady's 
slippers in the bird's bath, set the table 
for a company of robins and thrushes 
under a hawthorn tree, and sat breathless 
while a humming bird secured its lunch- 
eon from the blossom of a honeysuckle. 

I explained to my visitor that there 
were certain flowers that marked the 
time of day, that the morning glory 
appeared in the early hours, that 
other flowers unfolded during the middle 
of the day, and that promptly at four 
o'clock the flower of that name revealed 
its homely beauty. Of course my guest 
announced his intention of remaining 
until four, but as it was but eleven then. 



THE CHILD IN THE GARDEN 53 

and charming as he was I would not wish 
to entertain him for a whole day I was 
beginning to wonder how I might grace- 
fully dismiss him when a voice from the 
other side of the lilacs summoned him 
back to the home of my neighbor. 

"Well, next time I'll come at four," 
were his last words, and I knew that even 
if there never was a next time he would 
not soon forget this first visit to a garden. 
And as I again took up my trowel I fell 
to wondering what the coming child, 
born and reared in an apartment or hotel, 
and knowing flowers only from seeing 
them as part of the domestic decorations, 
or from observing them in florists' win- 
dows, would be like. He would not be at 
all like Pater's child whose house of 
thought was composed so largely of 
memories of gardens, of trees, of a 
window "across which the heavy blos- 
soms could beat so peevishly in the 
wind." And will he not, I asked myself, 
be defrauded of his birthright in being 



54 THE GATHERING BASKET 

thus deprived of a flowery background 
to life, and the memory of some opening 
garden gate? 




A Ghostly Garden Party 



F COURSE it is quite in the 
nature of things that having a 
garden one should give a garden 
party, a garden party such as one used 
to read of in EngHsh fiction, where 
heroes and heroines met against a 
lovely floral background, and fell in love 
at first sight. Was it not at a garden 
party that Gwendolen, the heroine of 
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, first 
became conscious of the admiration of 
Mr. Grandcourt, and where her beauty 
dazzled all who beheld her? But on 
second thought I believe it was an 
archery meeting, though it doesn't mat- 
ter, at least I know that it was an out-of- 
door affair, that the English estate where 
the meeting occurred afforded a beautiful 
settings for the flower-groups of ladies, 
"moving and bowing and turning their 
necks as it would become the leisurely 
lilies to do if they took to locomotion," 



56 THE GATHERING BASKET 

and lastly that Mr. Grandcourt was bored 
by the whole affair. 

But American garden parties are not 
like English ones, though they may be 
said to resemble them in one particular, 
that of being considered bores by the 
men. And somehow even my flowers 
have always seemed to disapprove of 
these gatherings, and to appear to the 
least advantage when acting as silent 
spectators of such functions. Perhaps 
they were jealous of the "flower-groups" 
of ladies, or resented the appearance of 
artificial blossoms on hats and gowns; 
but at any rate they have invariably 
presented wan and wilted countenances 
at these functions, and no doubt this 
fact was responsible for the presence of 
ghosts in my garden. 

I hit upon the idea of evoking my 
guests instead of inviting them, evoking 
them from the pages of the novels I had 
loved in my youth, and crowding my 
garden paths and benches with loved 
but imaginary personages. There are 
certain advantages about an imaginary 



A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY ,57 

garden party: you don't have to ask 
your guests whether they will have lemon 
or cream in their tea, and then too you 
may invite the men without fear of boring 
them. 

No, it wouldn't do to leave the men 
out for I could hardly imagine many of 
my beloved heroines unattended by their 
adorers. So, walking beside Cecilia, Ce- 
cilia of "upright mind," "great purity" 
and "virtue" was Mortimer Del vile, and 
accompanying the sprightly and high- 
spirited Elizabeth Bennet came the digni- 
fied and haughty Mr. Darcy. I was 
almost ashamed to summon Jane Eyre, 
and her beloved Mr. Rochester, for only 
recently I had been rereading Professor 
Saintsbury's Corrected Impressions, and 
had learned that Jane was something 
of an underbred hussy, and that Mr. 
Rochester's rudeness and ugliness were 
made altogether too much of. Of course 
Maggie Tulliver must be present, but 
when it came to asking her lover, Stehpen 
Guest, again Professor Saintsbury re- 
strained me, with his assertion that 



58 THE GATHERING BASKET 

Stephen was a mere "counter-jumping 
cad/' and wholly unworthy of Maggie. 
So I asked Philip Waken instead, and 
determined to consult the Professor no 
further as to who was who in literature. 
It was a rather mixed company of 
imaginaries that gathered in my garden, 
for besides those already mentioned were 
Catherine Lytton, Becky Sharp, The 
Lady of the Aroostook, Bathesheba Ever- 
dene, Gabriel Oak, Lord Ormont and his 
Aminta, Daisy Miller, and Anna Karen- 
ina. And over in one corner of the 
garden, on my favorite bench by the rose 
bed, sat three women who came unat- 
tended by men, and who were invited 
solely because of the soulful quality of 
the beauty bestowed upon them by their 
creators. First among these ladies was 
Mona Lisa, seemingly much out of place 
in an American garden, but invited 
there on the strength of Pater's memor- 
able word-picture of her beauty. "Set it 
for a moment beside one of those white 
Greek goddesses or beautiful women of 
antiquity, and how would they be 



A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY 59 

troubled by this beauty into which the 
soul with all its maladies has passed/* 

Beside Mona Lisa was seated Eleonora 
Duse, the one guest who lives outside of 
books, introduced by Arthur Symons, 
who has this to say of the beauty of the 
great Italian actress: *'She is a woman 
always, but she is a woman almost in the 
abstract; the senses are asleep, or awake 
only to give passion and substance to the 
disembodied energy of the intellect. 
When she speaks of beautiful things her 
face takes light as from an inner source; 
the dark and pallid cheeks curve into 
sensitive folds, the small thin-lipped 
mouth scarcely touched with colour, 
grows half tender, half ironical, as if 
smiling at its own abandonment to 
delight; an exquisite tremor awakens in 
it, as if it brushed against the petal of a 
flower, and thrilled at the contact; then 
the mouth opens, freely, and the strong 
white teeth glitter in a vehement smile." 

The third guest in this group was a 
modern American girl, Ellen Olenska, who 
owed her ghostly presence in my garden 



60 THE GATHERING BASKET 

to Edith Wharton's unforgettable analy- 
sis of her strange charm: "For she had 
a mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic 
and moving possibilities outside the daily 
run of experience. She had hardly ever 
said a word to him (Newland Archer), to 
produce this impression, but it was a 
part of her, either a projection of her 
mysterious and outlandish background, 
or something inherently dramatic, pas- 
sionate and unusual in herself." 

These three notable women were my 
most distinguished guests, but I could not 
but entertain some misgivings as to how 
they would get on together, and in fact 
I was troubled on this score in regard 
to all of my famous imaginaries. How 
could I dare to introduce Becky Sharp to 
Lord Ormont or Anna Karenina to Mr. 
Darcy? Gabriel Oak could never find 
anything to say to Aminta, I was sure, 
nor would he be any better off with Daisy 
Miller, or the Lady of the Aroostook. 
Yet I was quite sure that most of these 
old friends were flower-lovers, and in the 
presence of these, my assistant horticul- 



A GHOSTLY GARDEN PARTY 61 

tural hostesses, they might be trusted ta 
find some common ground for conversa- 
tion and some justification for my evoca- 
tions. 




The Plush Pansy 

IF COURSE a garden has its gray 
days, its seedy days, its down-at- 
the-heel, gone-to-mold-and-rust 
days. At such times every flower that 
you put in your basket has first to be 
rid of some enemy in the form of bug or 
caterpillar, and even the thoughts and 
quotations with which your mind has 
been freshly filled seem worm-eaten and 
worthless. As you languidly take up 
the trowel prepared to loosen the earth 
about some shriveled asters you ask 
yourself whether after all a garden is 
worth while, whether it is a wise invest- 
ment of one's time to spend a morning 
digging in earth that is sure to return to 
a cement-like condition as soon as your 
trowel has left it, or removing dead 
blossoms and seeds from plants that are 
predestined to seediness and death. 

Bugs and caterpillars are not suitable 
society for an active-minded person, you 



64 THE GATHERING BASKET 

say to yourself, and the appearance of 
so many seed pods is depressing to the 
spirit of one who would forget the dreari- 
ness of decline. Lamb was right after 
all; it is a peopled solitude that one 
should have, or as Emerson has put it, 
''Solitude is impracticable and society 
fatal. We must keep our head in the 
one and our hands in the other." And the 
city, you say to yourself, is where one may 
keep one's hands in society, and it is the 
proper place in which to spend the declin- 
ing days of summer. Instead of decline 
and decay there is rebirth and renewed 
life. The shop windows are all abloom 
with seasonable fineries, and the streets 
are gay with the early appearances of fall 
fashions. And there are musicals and 
matinees where one may go and forget 
the seediness, the bugs and the cater- 
pillars, and all the dreary panorama of 
this season of mists. 

You put down the trowel and consult 
the time table and within a couple of 
hours you make one of the vast throng 
that is crowding the walks and peering 



THE PLUSH PANSY 65 

in the shop windows. These windows are 
indeed fascinating, and that wreath of 
purple pansies in a milliner's showcase is 
worth all your rusty asters and drooping 
cosmos. How well would these plush 
reminders of spring look upon your fall 
hat, and inspired by this thought you go 
in and buy them, and in fancy see your 
face under its artificial wreath as a type 
of arrested springtime. Instead of gather- 
ing rosebuds while we may, you say to 
yourself, it is better to gather plush 
pansies for your hat and all the fripperies 
and fineries you can afford, and adorn 
yourself with them, for how long will it 
be before even a bit of finery will have no 
longer the power to move you.^ 

But how wearisome it is looking into 
shop windows and what a sameness to 
all the gew-gaws that they reveal. Bead- 
bags, gauzy blouses, startling ball-gowns 
soon begin to lose their charm and you 
find yourself wishing that they were 
subject to the onslaughts of bugs and 
worms, while the sight of elegant high- 
heeled shoes causes your mind to revert 



66 THE GATHERING BASKET 

to your beloved garden foot-gear. Thank 
heaven, you say to yourself, that you 
did not yield to the temptation of buying 
a matinee ticket. Fancy sitting in a 
stuffy theatre watching some sordid 
human drama when you might be an 
onlooker at nature's fall performances. 

You again consult the time table; it is 
but a little over an hour since you reached 
the city and yet already you are weary of 
the peopled solitude, and eager to keep 
both your head and your hands among the 
asters and cosmos. Only eleven minutes 
before the next train leaves; if you take 
a taxi you may catch it and be rid of all 
these city horrors. You are in the taxi, 
and later on the train, before you have 
really made up your mind about the 
matter, but how good it seems to be 
moving marigold wards. In a little more 
than an hour the tennis shoes are treading 
the familiar paths, the plush pansies are 
placed where they may blush unseen, and 
you are gazing in admiration at a rose 
that has unfolded during your absence. 
And the nice thing about the marigolds 



THE PLUSH PANSY 67 

and asters is that they don't ask you why 
you returned so soon, or why on earth 
you went at all. 




The Garden as a Social 
Centre 



SUPPOSE," I remarked to a 
noted landscape gardener, who 
in visiting my garden was in 
reality visiting one of his own children, 
the offspring of his own poetic horticul- 
tural fancy, "that every garden must 
have its evil genius, and mine has 
one in the form of a plain black snake, 
now hiding in the strawberry bed." 
**He fills my soul with terror," I went 
on, "and I would be grateful to any bold 
spirit who would venture to rid me of his 
presence." 

"You should thank God for him," said 
my visitor, "for he is one of the most 
valued friends of a garden, ridding it of 
hundreds of destructive enemies and 
making it more habitable for the flowers." 
I never arrived at the point of being 
grateful for the snake, who was a very 
well-mannered reptile, always withdraw- 



70 THE GATHERING BASKET 

ing into one of the beds as soon as I made 
my appearance in the path, but this 
remark of my visitor set me to thinking 
of the hosts of habitants and visitants of 
the garden who are forever working for 
its betterment, but who never receive any 
credit for what they do. And in time a 
true gardener grows to love many of these 
unobtrusive, silent companions, and to 
find pleasure in observing their ways and 
habits. Was it not poor Clym Yeobright, 
the hero of Hardy's Return of the 
Native, who when threatened blindness 
compelled him to engage in the humble 
occupation of furze-cutting found delight 
in the companionship of creeping and 
winged things: 

**Bees hummed around his ears with an 
i ntimate air, and tugged at the heath 
and furze-flowers at his side in such 
numbers as to weigh them down to the 
sod. The strange amber-coloured butter- 
flies which Egdon produced, and which 
were never seen elsewhere, quivered in 
the breath of his lips, alighted upon his 
bowed back, and sported with the glitter- 



THE GARDEN AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 71 

ing point of his hook as he flourished it 
up and down. Tribes of emerald green 
grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling 
awkwardly on their backs, heads or hips, 
like unskilful acrobats, as chance might 
rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flir- 
tations under the fern-fronds with silent 
ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant 
of larders and wire-netting, and quite in 
a savage state, buzzed about him without 
knowing that he was a man. In and out 
of the fern brakes snakes glided in their 
most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it 
being the season immediately following 
the shedding of their old skins, when 
their colors are brightest. Litters of 
young rabbits came out from their forms 
to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot 
beams blazing through the delicate tissue 
of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to 
a blood-red transparency in which the 
veins could be seen." 

Impertinent, destructive creatures, 
these last-named habitues of a garden, 
and one of the problems that confronts 
every gardener is the getting rid of such 



72 THE GATHERING BASKET 

troublesome neighbors. But I was will- 
ing, on this warm summer morning, to 
forget these enemies and even to put 
aside Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography 
which for several days had shared with 
The Return of the Native, the honor 
of being my only literary companions in 
the garden, in order to watch some bees 
which had taken up their residence in an 
old tree trunk. Yet before I laid down 
the story of this fascinating woman I had 
gathered some grist for my literary gar- 
den-mill from some lines written to her 
by her friend. Lord Pembroke: 

"Keep the outer borders of your heart's 
sweet garden, free from garish flowers 
and wild and careless weeds, so that 
when your fairy god-mother turns the 
Prince's footsteps your way he may not, 
distrusting your nature or his own powers, 
and only half-guessing at the treasures 
within, tear himself reluctantly away, 
and pass sadly on, without your ever 
knowing that he had been near." Rather 
an irrevelant quotation is this, having 
no bearing on the garden as a social 



THE GARDEN AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 73 

centre, but it is one more proof of the 
great debt that the pen owes to the 
garden. And as I said the bees drew me 
away from the brilliant Englishwoman, 
and caused me to take a seat by the side of 
an old tree trunk in which they had taken 
up their residence, in order that I might 
better study their actions. I could think 
of nothing but the lobby of a fashionable 
hotel as I noted their hurried comings 
and goings, only the bees appeared to 
have the advantage of the hotel guests 
inasmuch as they were unincumbered 
with luggage, and not so perseveringly 
bent on pleasure-seeking. And quite close 
to this home of the bees was a large ant- 
hill and when I grew weary of watching 
the bees I transferred my attention to 
the energetic ants. A number of air- 
ships passed over my head as I sat there, 
and I wondered whether their occupants 
did not look down curiously upon us 
gardeners in much the same way as we 
gaze upon the bees and ants. So much 
depends upon the point of view, and the 
views of aviators must be so very exalted ! 



74 THE GATHERING BASKET 

It would be interesting to keep a kind 
of garden register, in which could be 
inscribed the names of all these winged 
and creeping creatures, famous or humble, 
useful or harmful that find their way to 
a garden, and take upon themselves the 
duty of either helping to preserve or to 
destroy its beauty. A look at such a 
volume would convince the gardener of 
one thing at least, that there is no such 
thing as complete solitude in a garden. 




Cosmos, Cats and Coyotes 

HE act of propping up the cosmos 
this morning drew my thoughts 
to big things, and I turned my 
back on The Idiot, and The Princess 
Cassimassima, as mere fiction-folks who 
were not calculated to afford me the 
inspiration that I needed, and that would 
be in keeping with the cosmos. In reality, 
however, I should have been particularly 
kind to The Idiot and the Princess for 
I had left them out all night in my 
garden, and a shower had not added to 
their external appearance. Some one 
ought to get out garden editions of 
popular works, editions that would stand 
exposure to the weather, and could lie 
about in gardens, awaiting the pleasure 
of the gardener. 

But it was yesterday that I had sum- 
moned these two old acquaintances for 
brief moments of communion, and this 
morning it was not fiction but philosophy 



76 THE GATHERING BASKET 

that my soul desired. So I determined 
to put into the gathering basket three 
favorite philosophers, Montaigne, Scho- 
penhauer, and William James, or as much 
of the philosophy of the latter as could 
be extracted from his letters, now being 
published in the Atlantic Monthly. 

But when I went in search of the gath- 
ering basket I discovered that three 
kittens had taken possession of that 
receptacle, and were lying asleep, beside 
the trowel and scissors. I was obliged 
to eject them in order to make room for 
my philosophers, but I am not altogether 
sure that I did not turn out the greater 
philosophers, in order to make room for 
the less, so thoroughly in possession of 
the secret of happiness does a kitten 
seem to be. * 'Wonderful, wonderful, is 
our life and that of our companions,*' 
wrote Thoreau. "That there should be 
such a thing as a brute animal, not 
human! that it should attain to a sort of 
society with our race! Think of cats, for 
instance; they are neither Chinese or 
Tartars, they neither go to school or read 



COSMOS, CATS AND COYOTES 77 

the Testament. Yet how near they come 
to doing so, how much they are Hke us 
who do so." 

At the roots of some lovely pink cosmos 
I planted such thoughts from Montaigne 
as these: "True solitude is not to be 
found by mere withdrawal from a crowd ; 
all the evils of a crowd — ambition, avar- 
ice, irresolution, fear, inordinate desires 
may pursue us even into solitude. Our 
disease lies in the mind and the true 
solitude which can be enjoyed in cities 
and courts though not so commodiously 
as apart is attained only when the soul 
enters into real possession of itself. A 
wife, children, worldly goods, and more 
than all else, health are precious gains of 
existence, but our happiness must not 
depend on these, we must reserve a 
back-shop wholly our own, wholly free, 
wherein to maintain our true liberty and 
possess our impregnable retreat. Great- 
ness of soul consists not so much in 
mounting and pressing forward as in 
knowing how to range and circumscribe 
one's self." Quite in line with these 



78 THE GATHERING BASKET 

thoughts are Schopenhauer's assertions 
that the happiest man is one who has 
enough in his own inner wealth, that 
what one human being can be to another 
is not a very great deal, that the happiest 
destiny on earth is to have the rare gift 
of rich individuality. 

There was room for no more of Mon- 
taigne and Schopenhauer in my bed of 
cosmos, and I opened at random the last 
installment of William James' letters, and 
came upon this one, written while on a 
vacation in the mountains, to his seven- 
year-old son at home. 

**I saw a moving sight the other morn- 
ing before breakfast, in a little hotel 
where I slept in the dusty fields. The 
young man of the house had shot a little 
wolf called a coyote in the early morning. 
The heroic little animal lay on the ground 
with his big furry ears, and his clean 
white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little 
body, but his brave little life was gone. 
It made me think how brave all these 
living things are. Here little coyote was, 
without clothes or house, or books, or 



COSMOS, CATS AND COYOTES 79 

anything, with nothing but his own naked 
self to pay his way with, and risking his 
life SO cheerfully and losing it — just to 
see if he could pick up a meal near the 
hotel. He was doing his coyote business 
like a man hero, and you must do your 
boy -business, and I my man-business like 
a hero, or else we wont be worth as much 
as that little coyote.'* 

When I had supplied props for the 
cosmos, and had pondered over all these 
philosophic props for my soul, I picked 
some of the handsomest of the blossoms 
for the gathering basket, and placed them 
beside the Princess, The Idiot, and the 
philosophers. An oddly assorted com- 
pany they seemed, and yet they had one 
thing in common, they taught the same 
lesson, the lesson that Professor James 
learned from the coyote, that whatever 
we have to do in life, whether it be culti- 
vating the roots of plants or working for 
daily bread it behooves us to do our 
work like heroes, ''or else we wont be 
worth as much as that little coyote.'' 




A Shredded Day 



T WAS late when I entered the 
garden this morning, and I re- 
marked to the early-morn petu- 
nias with whom I had a weeding engage- 
ment, that really the egotism and in- 
considerateness of some women was past 
comprehension, and I was glad that it 
was my destiny to live among plants 
rather than among people. The occasion 
of these unoriginal observations was a 
morning call of which I was the victim, 
the caller being a former resident of our 
suburb who had returned a few weeks 
ago to her city apartment which had been 
rented furnished for the summer. The 
condition in which Mrs. Gray had found 
her apartment, and the damage for which 
her tenant was responsible made up the 
subject of her morning discourse, and 
was repeated I fancy in many a suburban 
home during the course of this day. It 
seems that her rolling pin had rolled 



82 THE GATHERING BASKET 

away into oblivion, that her lemon 
squeezer was nicked beyond further use, 
*'and my dear I just wish that you could 
have seen my double boiler!" 

But I had no wish to see her double 
boiler, and a very ardent desire to be 
among my double dahlias, and it was hard 
to forgive a morning visitor who could 
not realize her own unwelcomeness and 
the preciousness of her hostess' time. 
When I returned to the petunias after 
my guest had carried her rolling pin and 
double boiler to another house I took 
up a small volume of Emerson which is 
usually to be found on the table in my 
summer house, or under it in a rain-proof 
shelter, and read for a few minutes in 
order to quiet a disturbed mind. "Society 
is frivolous," says Emerson, "and shreds 
its days into patches." Yes, this is true, 
and the longer I live the more am I im- 
pressed by the value and dignity of 
solitude, and the more am I shocked by 
the daring of those who would venture to 
violate this solitude. What right have we 
to presume that people are willing to give 



A SHREDDED DAY 83 

up to US a tithe of anything so precious as 
time? And who are we that we should 
venture to think that we have attractions 
that would justify the sacrifice of duties 
on the part of an unwilHng hostess? 

Of course there are visitors whom we 
would welcome at any time, who reveal a 
beneficent power that calms the troubled 
waters, and smooths out the wrinkles from 
life. But how many people like this do we 
know? and besides a gardener has no 
troubled waters or wrinkled life. 

But my petunias, gay and cheerful 
companions though they always are, did 
not look quite so gay or so cheerful as 
they would had not this morning visitor 
taken the bloom from my thoughts, and 
even Emerson failed to restore this bloom. 
I found that my mind would wander 
away from the petunias to the subject of 
friendship, and I insisted upon putting 
that old banal question to myself as to 
whether there was such a thing, and 
whether in fact we had any need of 
friends in these days. Did not the tele- 
phone now take the place of those inti- 



84 THE GATHERING BASKET 

mate personal notes we used to exchange 
with so-called friends, and did not motors 
and movies afford the distraction that 
we were wont to demand of friendship? 

Literature, of course, offers many inspir- 
ing instances of devoted friendship : there 
is that of Amis and Amile in one of the 
early French stories which Pater recalls 
in the opening essay of the collection 
entitled The Renaissance. "Amis and 
Amile, then, are true to their comrade- 
ship through all trials; and in the end it 
comes to pass that at the moment of great 
need Amis takes the place of Amile in a 
tournament for life or death. After this 
it happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis 
so that his wife would not approach him, 
and wrought to strangle him; and he 
departed from his home, and at last 
prayed his servants to carry him to the 
house of Amile." Amile was equal to 
this test, and to the still greater one 
demanded by the angel Raphael that he 
slay his two children in their sleep and 
wash his comrade in their blood, that 
he might be made whole. 



A SHREDDED DAY 85 

No, we don't hear of such acts of friend- 
ship these days, though perhaps the true 
story of the great war may relate instances 
of comradeship and self sacrifice quite as 
edifying. Then of course there was the 
friendship between the Merchant of Venice 
and his friend Antonio that is lovely to 
contemplate, and there is Diana of the 
Crossways' devotion to her invalid friend, 
Emma, Lady Dunstane. When Percy 
Dacier met Diana, by chance, early one 
morning on a mountain walk, that lady car- 
ried a bunch of pale purple meadow-crocus 
in her hand and in response to his exclama- 
tion of pleasure at the sight of them she said : 
"These are plucked to be sent to a friend; 
otherwise I'm reluctant to take the life of 
flowers for a whim. Wild flowers, I mean, I 
am not sentimental about garden flowers : 
they are cultivated for decoration, grown 
for clipping." To a gardener, of course, 
this is the supreme test of friendship : to be 
willing to take the life of a flower for a friend . 

Yes, there are endless examples of fine 
friendships in literature, but in one's own 
humdrum life where do we find them; 



86 THE GATHERING BASKET 

they are dreams and fables as Emerson 
says. And how very botanical Emerson 
becomes when writing of friendship: **I 
have often had fine fancies about persons, 
which have given me delicious hours," 
he writes, **but the joy ends in the day; 
it yields no fruit." And again, in warn- 
ing us not to shun any of the realities of 
the plant of friendship: "The root of the 
plant is not unsightly to science, though 
for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem 
short." And again: ** Almost all people 
descend to meet. All association must be 
a compromise, and, what is worst, the very 
flower and aroma of the flower of each of 
the beautiful natures disappears as they 
approach each other." 

I was so grateful to Emerson for these 
unconscious tributes to the garden, and 
for his dependence upon flowers and 
fruits for literary symbols that I turned 
to the rosy morns with restored good 
humor, and although my mind as well as 
my morning had been unpleasantly shred- 
ded, the afternoon was still before me. 



Architectural Blossoms 



OST of the arts may be enjoyed 
in a garden; literature may be 
brought there, along with the 
garden tools, painting one can very well 
do without, for has not every gardener a 
private gallery of her own? and music 
may be enticed there, or will come steal- 
ing across the lilac hedge uninvited. But 
architecture you must go forth to seek, 
and if you be one who regards the arts 
as one distinguished family made up of 
wholly different, but equally beautiful 
individuals then you must feel that you 
cannot afford to forego intercourse with 
a single fascinating member of this 
remarkable group. For as Pater has said: 
**the sensuous material of each art brings 
with it a special phase or quality of 
beauty, untranslatable into the forms of 
any other, an order of impressions dis- 
tinct in kind." A greedy gardener who 
is a lover of the arts, and no true flower. 



88 THE GATHERING BASKET 

lover can be indifferent to them, longs 
sometimes for the peculiar kind of impres- 
sions that only architecture can give, 
and she is ready then to neglect her 
cosmos and to go forth to seek a Gothic 
cathedral. 

Of course it is almost like planting a 
Gothic cathedral in one's garden to read 
again that inspiring essay of Ruskin's: 
The Nature of the Gothic, that mine of 
philosophy as well as of architecture 
which is said to have set fire to the 
enthusiasm of William Morris, and to have 
kindled the beliefs of his whole life. "To 
my mind," says Morris, "this chapter is 
one of the most important things written 
by the author, and in future days will be 
considered as one of the very few neces- 
sary utterances of the century.'' 

Time has born out this statement of the 
poet-socialist, and to read to-day of the 
nature of the Gothic, is to read at the 
same time some noble truths about the 
nature of man. 

For man, like Gothic Architecture, is 
essentially imperfect, says Ruskin. 'Tn 



ARCHITECTURAL BLOSSOMS 89 

all things that live there are certain 
irregularities and deficiencies which are 
not only signs of life, but sources of 
beauty. No human face is exactly the 
same in its lines on each side, no leaf 
perfect in its lobes, no branch in its 
symmetry. All admit irregularity as they 
imply change; and to banish imperfec- 
tion is to destroy expression, to check 
exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things 
are literally better, lovlier and more be- 
loved for the imperfections which have 
been divinely appointed, that the law of 
human life may be Effort, and the law of 
human judgment Mercy." 

These are comforting thoughts for the 
gardener's mental gathering basket, and 
here is another intellectual blossom: 
''Now it is only by labour that thought 
can be made healthy, and only by thought 
that labour can be made happy, and the 
two cannot be separated with impunity.'* 
Here Ruskin has expressed the secret of 
the happiness of a book-loving gardener, 
who has learned by experience that it is 
her labour that has made the thoughts 



00 THE GATHERING BASKET 

that come to her through books healthy, 
and that this labour could not bring the 
joy that it does were it not for such book- 
inspired thoughts. And she feels that for 
the restlessness that sometimes besets 
her, even while digging, there is a justi- 
fication, for is not disquietude the key 
to the Gothic spirit, and does she not 
therefore toil with the restlessness of a 
Goth? "That restlessness of the dream- 
ing mind, that wanders hither and thither 
among the niches, and flickers feverishly 
around the pinnacles, and frets and fades 
in labyrinthine knots and shadows along 
wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied nor 
shall be satisfied. The Greek could stay 
in its triglyph furrow, and be at peace, 
but the work of the Gothic spirit is fret- 
work still, and it can neither rest in, nor 
from its labour, but must pass on sleep- 
lessly, until its love of change shall be 
pacified forever in the change that must 
come alike on them that wake and them 
that sleep." 

It is almost like wandering in a garden 
to allow one's mind to **flicker feverishly" 



ARCHITECTURAL BLOSSOMS 91 

through this remarkable essay, for the 
reader is made to reahze how much 
architecture owes to nature, to flowers 
and trees, for its inspiration: for ex- 
ample, there are the rose windows, the 
Venetian flower-orders, the lily columns 
of St. Marks, the flowering plants carved 
in the Veronese niches. Yes, Architec- 
ture had to go to the garden for much 
of its material, and Ruskin is the one to 
analyze its methods of using this material. 
And for a type of the life of this world the 
great author turns to our beloved fox- 
glove blossom: "a third part bud, a 
third part past, a third part in full 
bloom." I had always resented the 
third part that is past, both in the fox- 
glove and in other flowers of a similar 
nature, but after reading Ruskin's essay 
I learned to accept such blossoms and to 
respect them as symbols of our imperfect 
life. 




Souls, Seeds and Forsythias 

T SEEMS as if there is not 
enough cheerful Hterature in the 
whole world to fortify the urban 
spirit of a country gardener against the 
depression produced by these days of 
decline and decay. And although I filled 
the gathering basket, on this dreary 
November morning, with all the pleasant 
things about autumn that I knew, I 
could not but feel that odes to melan- 
choly and dejection would be more in 
keeping with my mood, and with the 
appearance of the garden. 

Of course I know that she is no true 
gardener who permits her spirit to droop 
at the sight of the first frosted four 
o'clock, or whose heart sinks at behold- 
ing the blackened foliage of her marigold 
plants, but on the other hand she is an 
unnatural mother to these foster children 
whom she has watched and cared for 
throughout the summer if she does not 



94 THE GATHERING BASKET 

mourn over their decay. It is in vain 
that I assure myself that the perennials 
go to sleep only for the winter, that many 
of the annuals are self -seeders, and have 
some unanticipated blossoms up their 
sleeves with which to surprise their care- 
taker during the coming summer. For 
I know only too well that perennials fre- 
quently belie their names and are annual 
in their characters while the self-seeders 
are often self -deceivers as well. To be 
sure there is a certain satisfaction in put- 
ting the perennials to bed for the winter, 
in tucking the blankets of leaves about 
the cherished roses, and in putting out 
the lights on the pinks, but these are 
melancholy satisfactions at best, and not 
calculated to raise the gardener's spirit. 
So while I paused before some withered 
hollyhocks, and gathered the last of their 
seeds, I repeated to myself Emily Dick- 
enson's gay verses on Autumn: 

"The morns are meeker than they were, 
The nuts are getting brown; 
The berry's cheek is plumper, 



SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 95 

The rose is out of town. 
The maple wears a gayer scarf 

The field a scarlet gown. 
Lest I should be old-fashioned, 

I'll put a trinket on.'' 

But I did not feel in the least like put- 
ting a trinket on, and besides, these lines 
were written about an autumn that the 
frost had not yet touched to decay. And 
the same might be said of the lines in 
which Henry James gives his impression 
of a New England autumn which was a 
part of the American Scene revisited 
after many years of absence. Autumn 
was likened by the great novelist to a 
kind of imprisoned painter, "a Bohemian 
in rusty jacket who had broken out with 
palette and brush." "Yet the way the 
color begins to be dabbed," wrote James, 
"the way here and there for a start, a 
solitary maple on a woodside flames in 
single scarlet recalls nothing so much as 
the daughter of a noble house dressed for 
a fancy ball, with the whole family gath- 
ered round to admire her before she goes." 



96 THE GATHERING BASKET 

But nature, this morning, presents 
an after -the -ball appearance, and the 
daughter of the noble house, as well 
as her whole family, look dingy and 
faded. 

So even Henry James failed to console 
me for the loss of my beloved flowers, 
among whose faded remnants I now sadly 
wandered. A few ugly yellow stalks are 
all that is left of some gay sweet-williams, 
the dried and withered skeletons next to 
them were once the brightest of blue 
bachelor buttons, and those prostrate 
brown stems in the bed beyond, early in 
the season, answered to the name, if not 
the nature, of bouncing bets. All things 
of the past now, mere misty objects of 
memory. And it is the same with the 
literary flowers that have graced my 
garden during the summer. Evelina and 
Emma, Catherine Lytton, Henry 
Esmond, Diana of the Crossways, The 
Idiot, The Princess Cassimassama, all 
gone, while their creators, along with my 
beloved poets and essayists, live only in 
the memories of their readers. 



SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 97 

Then I took from the gathering basket 
a volume of Keats, and turned to that 
verse in the *Ode to Autumn,' of which 
Sidney Colvin said that "it expresses so 
transparently and so directly the pen- 
siveness of the season that we almost 
forget that they are words at all and 
nature herself and the season seem speak- 
ing to us." 

"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay 
where are they? 
Think not of them, thou hast thy 
music too, 
While barred clouds bloom the soft 
dying day, 
And touch the stubble fields with rosy 
hue; 
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats 
mourn 
Among the river sallows, borne aloft 
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; 
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from 
hilly bourn; 
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with 
treble soft 



98 THE GATHERING BASKET 

The redbreast whistles from a garden- 
croft. 

And gathering swallows twitter in the 
skies/' 

Yes, Keats is one of the perennials, and 
as I proceeded to uproot some shriveled 
asters, and to gather seeds from their 
dried stems I recalled other literary per- 
ennials that had been my close compan- 
ions during the summer and I quoted to 
myself the comforting things they had 
said concerning dissolution. There was 
Montaigne whose essay entitled That to 
Philosophize is to Learn to Die, contains 
such unforgettable seeds of thought as 
these: **Your death is a part of the order 
of the universe, 'tis a part of the life of 
the world. The utility of living consists 
not in the length of days but in the use 
of time. There is nothing evil in life for 
him who rightly comprehends that the 
privation of life is no evil." 

These, I said to myself, are seeds worth 
preserving, and so are some of Pater's 
philosophical reasonings: ''Not to dis- 



SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 99 

criminate every moment some passionate 
attitude in those about us, and in the 
brilliancy of their gifts some tragic divid- 
ing of forces on their ways, is, on this 
short day of frost and sun, to sleep before 
evening." And again Emerson's analysis 
of the method of Nature brings some 
autumn consolation: "We cannot de- 
scribe the natural history of the soul, but 
we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if 
these wonderful qualities which house 
to-day in this mortal frame shall ever 
reassemble in equal activity in a similar 
frame, or whether they have before had a 
natural history like that of this body 
you see before you; but this one thing I 
know, that these qualities did not now 
begin to exist, cannot be sick with my 
sickness, nor buried in any grave; but 
that they circulate through the Universe ; 
before the world was they were." 

Yes, these are great thoughts, and 
applicable to plants as well as to persons 
though perhaps it may be stated with 
greater certainty in the case of the plant, 
for do I not hold in my hands the seeds 



100 THE GATHERING BASKET 

whose qualities will reassemble in similar 
frames? Yet nevertheless, if autumn has 
its music and its musings they are tinged 
with sadness, and a gardener is peculiarly 
sensitive to this autumn melancholy. 
And then as I wandered towards the 
end of the garden I came upon one of 
nature's phenomenons: a forsythia in 
flower. Now every one who is familiar 
with this bush knows that it is almost 
the first of our cultivated, flowering 
shrubs, to announce the arrival of spring 
and that its blossoms, golden bells they 
are sometimes called, appear before the 
leaves. But here was a bush, whose 
leaves had turned to a beautiful autumn- 
ish old rose, putting forth delicate yellow 
blossoms that were smaller, but far more 
lovely than those of Spring. I could but 
recall the words of Santayanna, quoted in 
a previous essay: "Even under the in- 
evitable crust of age the soul remains 
young, and wherever it is able to break 
through sprouts into something green 
and tender." The forsythia seemed to be 
the very floral embodiment of this senti- 



SOULS, SEEDS AND FORSYTHIAS 101 

ment, the symbol of the souFs power to 
defy age and the season, and break into 
the greenness and tenderness of spring on 
a day in late autumn. 

And I was half angry with myself that 
on my way back to the house with the 
gathering basket, in which, beside a sprig 
of the forsythia, lay Montaigne and Pater 
Keats and Emerson, on my arm, I should 
find myself quoting Kipling (who had 
never been among my close garden inti- 
mates), and repeating to myself another 
of his verses on the garden: 

"Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who 

made him sees 
That half a proper gardener's work is 

done upon his knees. 
So when your work is finished, you can 

wash your hands and pray 
For the Glory of the Garden that it may 

not pass away! 
And the glory of the garden it shall never 

pass away!" 



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